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Interior. Leather bar.

In order to avoid an X rating, 40 minutes of gay S&M footage was rumored to be cut and destroyed from the 1980 film, “Cruising.” Inspired by the mythology of this controversial film, filmmakers James Franco and Travis Mathews collaborate to imagine their own lost footage.
Amid the backdrop of a frenzied film set actor Val Lauren reluctantly agrees to take the lead in the film. Val is repeatedly forced to negotiate his boundaries during scenes on and “off camera,” as unsimulated gay sex happens around him. The film itself is constructed as a play with boundaries remaining queer in subject and form. As much a film about filmmaking as it is about an exploration of sexual and creative freedom, “Interior. Leather Bar.” defies easy categorization.

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James Franco’s new art film Interior. Leather Bar., directed by him and filmmaker Travis Mathews, is all about gay sex, and Franco’s damn proud of it.

Premiering at this week’s Sundance Film Festival, the gay S&M film reimagining 40 minutes of footage rumored to be taken out of William Friedkin’s 1980 drama Cruising blurs the boundaries between observer and observed, truth and fiction, delight and pain.

Just check out this seriously NOT SAFE FOR WORK exclusive clip from the movie, below, featuring Franco — playing a version of himself — flinching as a man is pleasurably beaten off camera. Later on, talking to Val Lauren, the movie’s lead, Franco totally sounds off on acceptance of straight societal norms. “Every f—king love story is a dude that wants to be with a girl, and the only way they’re going to end up happy is if they walk off into the sunset together,” he says. “I’m f—king sick of that s—t. So if there’s a way for me to just break that up in my own mind, I’m all for it. … Sex should be a storytelling tool, but we’re so f—king scared of it.”

EW talked to Franco about Interior.Leather Bar., and for a separate story, about kink, the documentary he produced about a San Francisco-based BDSM porn company, also premiering at Sundance. Not much was off limits for the Oscar-nominated actor, known for his multiple degrees, his creative projects, and movies spanning the gamut between serious drama (127 Hours), stoner comedy (Pineapple Express), sex and violence filled comedy (Harmony Korine’s upcoming Spring Breakers), and big-budget fantasy (Disney’s upcoming Oz the Great and Powerful).

Hearing an actor enamored by girls and guys the world over talk frankly about sex, gay sex, and bondage was, honestly, completely refreshing. You can almost hear boundaries splinter and crack.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: There’s been a lot of controversy surrounding Interior. Leather Bar., 60-minute film you’ve co-directed, premiering at Sundance. It’s shocking, in a way, for American audiences to see sex, and gay sex, explored bluntly.
JAMES FRANCO: I really liked certain aspects of the old movie Cruising, with Al Pacino. I know there was controversy when it was made. Friedkin, by putting a serial killer in the gay community, he sort of implied that sort of lifestyle led to murder and other horrible scenes. It was at a time the gay rights movement was just getting on its feet. There were a lot of protests. Years later, decades later, it transformed, because none of the leather bars where it was shot exist anymore. It was a portrait of a time now gone, before AIDS. The movie, in later years, was accepted, and they did a special presentation of it at Cannes recently. I was interested in a lot of things with that original movie and didn’t want to remake the movie.

What else prompted you to jump into doing a movie about this community, the gay S&M scene? Travis Mathews’ own movies focus on gay men.
I felt it was really hard to find people engaging with this material in an exciting way. … There was a lot there that was still kind of censored. Not [just] censored by a ratings board, and it has been, but also by economics, that no one is going to make these movies and distribute them in certain places. I wanted to engage in that without holding back, and find a way in. It was a gradual process to find what the way in would be. Along the way I was introduced to Travis and Travis’ work, and very quickly realized that the project would be served by having an equal collaborator, someone who had more experience than me in this sort of material. In some ways, he was my guide.

You’re a huge mainstream actor, you star in big budget movies, you’re considered a handsome leading man, and yet you also have this heavily artistic side that pushes you to take on controversial material. How did this hybrid identity affect Interior. Leather Bar.?
My history and my place in mainstream cinema helped us shape the approach we were going to take. That’s why I’m in the film playing myself, a version of myself. It frames the context of this movie and this material. There are documentaries about pornography. I just made one, kink. The approach we took was not to really get into the ins and outs of pornography. It was really juxtaposing mainstream cinema and different kinds of representations of queer cinema.

In the Interior. Leather Bar. clip we’re premiering on EW.com, you flinch at the beginning, watching a heavy-duty S&M scenario. Had you seen any porn being filmed, in person, before Interior. Leather Bar. and kink?
I actually had seen some before. Before I did Interior. Leather Bar., I had seen some porn being shot at the kink.com facility in San Francisco. And when preparing for a role I did a long time ago called Sonny [in 2002], in which I played a male prostitute, I observed a guy prostitute on a date and he took me along and let me watch. I was probably 22. If I was flinching, it probably had something to do with the BDSM. There’s a guy named Master Avery, and he was spanking some other guys with a paddle. He was doing it a lot, so one of the guy’s asses got really bruised. So I was probably reacting to that.

You play a hybrid role in Interior. Leather Bar. as actor, observer and director, but you’re always observing the sex, never participating in it yourself. Which would definitely grab people’s attention if you did!
I play a dual role in this project. I co-directed and designed it with Travis, but I’m also in front of the camera, and my presence in front of the camera is an important component of the movie. Maybe the sequel, I engage in the sex. It wasn’t my job to do that in this piece. In some ways, that would put too much focus on myself, I think, the focus I was actually having sex in front of a camera. That would take all the attention. It’s about me and it’s not about me. It’s about me lending my history and my place in movies to a project that may otherwise not get the same amount of attention. It’s enough for me to be the observer in this.

That’s interesting is your history with being sexual in other films. I saw Spring Breakers premiere at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, and you play this funny gangster guy who has realistic looking sex with two female characters in the movie.
I did a project with the artist Paul McCarthy: a piece called Rebel for MOCA in L.A. If you know Paul’s work, the videos end up with everyone naked. We were recreating very screwed up versions of scenes in Rebel Without a Cause. He immediately had his pants down, and I was riding on his back, and told him to squeal like a pig. And we ended up wrestling and he was naked the whole time. I don’t have really that many inhibitions anymore, after doing that with Paul. I’m just very conscious about how sex is used in a project I do. With Spring Breakers, it’s not like I was having real sex.

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Ray Greene on Sundance 2013: 'Interior: Leather Bar'

It's been fashionable for some time to scoff at James Franco's creative restlessness, as well as what appears to be his genuine unconcern with conventional outcomes in his alternative films projects. After the brave and affecting collaboration that is "Interior. Leather Bar.," I'm pretty sure we all have to take him seriously now.

"Interior. Leather Bar." is a pretty fearless movie to come with the imprint of a name movie star on it -- someone who hosted the Oscars a year ago and who is, as is pointed out within the film itself, "starring in a big movie from Disney" in the very near future ("Oz the Great and Powerful"). "ILB" is also -- thankfully, and perhaps somewhat miraculously -- a fully achieved, absolutely unique piece of work, somewhat comparable to the films of experimentalist William Greaves, but mostly a thing all its own owing to its adventurous spirit and the way it intersects with core contradictions of the image manufacturing complex Franco himself is so very much a part of.

The premise of "ILB" does not describe this movie adequately, nor do it justice, but here it is: Co-directors Franco and Travis Mathews have decided to imagine their own version of 40 minutes of footage excised from William Friedkin's notorious 1980 psychological thriller "Cruising," in which New York cop Al Pacino went undercover within the sado-masochistic subset of that era's gay demi-monde to hunt for a serial killer.

"Cruising" was a watershed event in American movie history, in that what was taken to be its equation of homosexuality with violent psychopathology ignited protests and widespread cries of "homophobia" for the first time. But Franco and Mathews aren't interested in that aspect of "Cruising's" legacy, except tangentially, in their avowed desire to reclaim the film's right to its own voice. In one of the first scenes, Franco makes a nuanced point about the whole idea of normality and transgression, questioning, in conversation with Mathews, what might be lost once gay marriage becomes the norm, and whether the desire to claim a universal right will morph into pressure on gay couples to conform to middle class norms about marriage and love.

Franco and Mathews are not remotely interested in a serious attempt to recreate "Cruising's" narrative strategies, as evidenced by the fact that their "recreation" is entirely improvised, is filmed almost exclusively in close-ups, and also occupies far less than 40 minutes of screen time. The co-directors are instead much more intrigued by "Crusing's" central social experiment--that of placing an ostensibly "straight" man inside a sexual context that violates his own ideas about what's normal, and then seeing how he reacts.

Toward that end, longtime Franco friend and acting colleague Val Lauren is cast in the Pacino role, and then filmed as he's nervously prepared to expect pretty much anything to happen on set. Lauren takes concerned phone calls from well-meaning homophobic friends and from his wife, and he's tracked as he interacts with a variety of actors -- both straight and gay -- who've been hired to simulate and also to perform sex acts in Franco and Mathews' stripped-down club set. It's not quite possible to categorize "Interior. Leather Bar" as a documentary, although it certainly has that feel much of the time. A playful streak emerges about halfway through, when Lauren is finally given a few pages of script to read, shakes his head, and then is shown to be "performing" his upset for Mathews and the camera crew, who compliment him on the believable discomfort we thought was actually happening before our eyes.

There is a strong pornographic flavor to much of "Interior. Leather Bar.," including lingering images of male body parts we don't necessarily associate with actors who star in Disney tentpole films (pun unintended) or as sidekick characters in Spider-Man movies. If that limits "Interior. Leather Bar's" appeal or its distribution, the filmmakers seem more than willing to live with that.

Here's the thing, though: as a nuanced and almost loving exploration of imagery and topics that are frequently dealt with via political hysteria, "Interior. Leather Bar." deserves as wide an audience as is possible for it to obtain. It's a film that doesn't explore sexual transgression so much as question how anything like consensual sex ever became equated with transgression in the first place. That it does this within a layered but quite accessible analysis of filmmaking itself as both a tool for sexual exploration and an accomplice in painting scarlet letters over common human acts of affection and pleasure makes this one of the more intricate hour-long movies you're likely to see.

Re: Interior. Leather bar.

Highlights of the Sundance Film Festival

PARK CITY, Utah — This year’s Sundance Film Festival, marked by aesthetic ambition, a formidable female presence and enough on-screen sex to take the chill off, gives optimistic proof of the state of American independent cinema. Under the affable, low-key leadership of John Cooper, who took over as festival director in 2009, Sundance has firmly settled into a groove, one that places movies above buzz. Celebrities, freebies and brands remain part of the clamorous mix — after the premiere of his experimental short “Interior. Leather Bar.” James Franco laughingly said that he had picked up his red Christmas sweater from Dockers — but, as at other screenings, there was more to that night than stargazing.

One of the sharpest, best surprises of the festival, which ends Sunday, “Interior. Leather Bar.” is a serious yet playful hourlong deconstruction of the representation of homosexuality as viewed through the prism of “Cruising,” William Friedkin’s 1980 film about an undercover cop, played by a supremely jittery Al Pacino, searching for a killer of gay men. “Interior,” directed by Mr. Franco and Travis Mathews, uses as its conceptual jumping-off point a lost 40-minute segment of “Cruising” set in a gay leather bar that Mr. Friedkin has said he had to cut to avoid an X rating. “Interior” primarily turns on the on-set experience of Val Lauren, an actor who appears as himself and as an idea of Mr. Pacino’s, while performing in a re-creation of the missing “Cruising” material.

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Big news! James Franco will attend the upcoming 15th Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, where he will receive an Ally Award on April 28 and his new film Interior. Leather Bar will be screened sometime during the festival.

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James Franco, Travis Mathews offer new film in place of 'banned' gay sex feature

Filmmaker Travis Mathews, whose feature I Want Your Love was controversially prevented from screening at three queer film festivals and who has previously had a short film banned here, finally has a movie in an Australian cinema.

The censor has granted an exemption from classification to allow MQFF to present the Australian premiere of Interior: Leather Bar, a work that Mathews co-directed with Hollywood actor James Franco, star of the Disney blockbuster Oz The Great and Powerful.

Mathews and Franco have made the film available, says MQFF director Lisa Daniel, following the refusal of Classification Australia to grant an exemption for I Want Your Love, which features about six minutes of explicit gay sex scenes.

Franco drew international attention to the case by releasing a video post on YouTube in which he decried the effective banning of the film as "just embarrassing".

Daniel says that Interior: Leather Bar is particularly topical for the way it deals with issues of censorship.

The movie is a re-engagement with William Friedkin's controversial Cruising, a 1980 film that starred Al Pacino as a homicide cop who goes undercover in leather bars to seek out a serial killer. Forty minutes of the film were excised before it was allowed a cinema release in the United States.

In Interior: Leather Bar, Franco and Mathews present a vision of the sort of explicit scenes that might have been cut from Cruising, while focusing on extended discussions about the nature of the project, representations of sexuality and issues around creative freedom.

Actor Val Lauren plays the Pacino role, and takes part in discussions with Franco about the issues arising from the film.

One of the things Franco reflects on, says Daniel, is his feeling that he has been locked into a certain conformity as an actor. ''He also asks why are we so scared of gay sex?'' she says.

The Melbourne Queer Film Festival begins on Thursday March 14. Interior: Leather Bar screens at ACMI on March 25.

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Interior. Leather Bar will be shown at the Cleveland International Film Festival on April 6th at 10:00 PM an April 7th at 5:40 PM. I expect the tickets to sell out. Don't buy your ticket until I have a chance to buy mine.

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I just saw this movie and I can't recommend it. It was alright but nothing special. James Franco was fully clothed. There were a few nude sex scenes but nothing that I thought was really sexy and not that much of it.

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The general consensus is that he is "at least bisexual". If he had a true interest in "gay culture", he wouldn't be afraid to address lesbians.

I think the tabbo on gay men and sex between men is much stronger than lesbians and sex between girls. You could even take Springbreakers as an example of that.

Originally Posted by Rickrock

I just saw this movie and I can't recommend it. It was alright but nothing special. James Franco was fully clothed. There were a few nude sex scenes but nothing that I thought was really sexy and not that much of it.

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his answer to the 2nd from last question makes it sound as if gay sex is something he has 1st hand experience with before in his personal life....i love him and hope he comes out soon

It would be great if James Franco would come out but he's an A list international superstar those guys just don't come out too much to lose.

I think Franco loves the attention of the media and public wondering is he or isn't he? Notice, Franco did not get involved in any of the gay sex scenes in Interior Leather Bar. If he's so passionate as he says about telling a story, and getting it right why didn't he participate? And I think that's where Franco realizes he can't go "too far" if he did participate in the gay sex scenes in Interior Leather Bar it might hurt his acting career. He even said recently he lost three commercial endorsements because the companies think he's gay.

He seems to be edging close to coming out but he's hesitant to do it.

Franco has two hit movies out right now Oz the great and the powerful and spring breakers. James is on a hot streak right now, I think the general public realize he isn't heterosexual I think he's at least bisexual.

I have never seen such a high profile male actor so interested in male homosexuality before. Franco seems very passionate about gay sex. It is true, why doesn't Franco focus his attention on lesbian sex or whatever I am sure nobody would blink an eye.

Maybe, Franco just wants to be edgy, or controversial? I saw Franco's film The Broken Tower and honestly that movie was terrible it was just garbage a very bad film. The acting was poor, the plot was poor, the only good thing about that film was the gay sex scenes.

I remember reading an interview Franco had with Playboy Magazine over a year ago and he talked about sexuality being blurred and about queer theory. He seems to be using his art as a way to explore his sexuality but never having to actually come out of the closet.

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Originally Posted by Rickrock

I just saw this movie and I can't recommend it. It was alright but nothing special. James Franco was fully clothed. There were a few nude sex scenes but nothing that I thought was really sexy and not that much of it.

not sure why you'd think that if you knew anything about this project.

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I did not have detailed information about the film. I thought that he would at least be shirtless and probably less and would participate in the bar scenes. I do not read movie magazines and keep up with things that way. Why wouldn't I beleive that he would be at least partially undressed?

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Cruising

Arguably the most controversial gay-themed movie ever made, Cruising stars Al Pacino as a jittery cop who infiltrates New York’s S/M scene to investigate a series of unsettling gay murders. Director William Friedkin’s 1980 mystery, which inspired James Franco’s recent Interior. Leather Bar., remains one of cinema’s most unfairly-maligned thrillers. It’s again available on DVD after a lengthy moratorium.

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An Interview With Travis Mathews: On Franco and Interior. Leather Bar

Why did you and James Franco make this movie?

I’ll talk about this but I don’t want to go too deeply into his motivations because I feel like – I don’t want to speak for him. But I can tell you he wanted to revisit Cruising in some capacity; he wanted to do a project with a lot of sex in it that was being explored in like a narrative context. And he didn’t want to do this on his own. He felt like he needed to collaborate with someone. So that was the most he knew he wanted to do when he reached out to me.

And when he reached out to me, that’s all I knew: James Franco, Cruising, sex.

And I didn’t know him or anything, so it was kind of a strange…it’s like one of those stories that happen maybe in a Hollywood movie fifty years ago that never really ever happens.

But, yeah, it was very cool. And I knew immediately before I even talked to him that those three elements–him, Cruising and explicit sex–were going to mean that whatever we created was going to be like a lightning rod of the film, in and of itself.

It would be provocative and people would love it or hate it for various reasons. One, because I knew that within the gay community there was a bubbling sense of people–gay men in particular–getting a little suspicious of why he was doing so many gay-themed projects. And people both wondering and curious as to whether or not he was gay. And then if he’s not gay, why does he care? And that question comes up all the time, all the time, all the time. And I knew before I even talked to him that it was going to be something we needed to deal with. That was one reason why we incorporated that conversation into the film. Like when you see the extras and they’re sort of de-constructing what the whole thing is and why it is and what people say about him and his motivations.

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The hyphenate goes hardcore in Interior. Leather Bar.

James Franco’s been winking at gay audiences for years, and it’s sometimes hard to tell if he’s flirting or kidding. Both are possibilities in his latest project, Interior. Leather Bar., a “docufiction” that riffs on the idea of recreating 40 minutes of footage that were cut from William Friedkin’s lurid 1980 film Cruising to avoid an X rating (it's in select theaters beginning March 5).

Friedkin’s movie, which starred Al Pacino as an undercover cop investigating a serial killer in New York’s seedy S&M demimonde, was once the target of furious protests by LGBT activists, who thought it presented gay sexuality in scary and stereotypical ways.

“There seems to be a generational divide,” says Travis Mathews, whom Franco recruited to write and codirect. “Most guys in their thirties or younger are in some way amused by the murderous and homophobic content — it’s almost quaint. But for older men it still brings up bad feelings.”